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Monthly Archives: August 2014

That annoying situation where I don’t wanna write formally about something, but twitter is too short form to do it without annoying the piss out of everyone and if I go on tumbr I’ll just be talking to people who don’t need to be told stuff again, so… I guess here we are.

Not going to give a real event summary. If you don’t know whats up you can look up #Gamegate or Quinnspiracy and read about it. Basically an indie game dev slept with a bunch of people (which shouldn’t be relevant but people keep bringing it up), one of which was a journo at kotaku and this was allegedly to promote her game Depression Quest. So now people are freaking out about corruption in games journalism or just her or whatever so I’m going to give my thoughts on some things.

Assuming she even slept with him for that reason, two big things bother me about basing critiques of the journalism industry off of this; It poisons the well. First it’s treating this as anything different or unique. There isn’t anything special about the corruption that went on with Quinn. Sex is about the same as money in this context and she paid off a journalist. Everyone goes screaming that this was unfair. I remember reading some bullshit somewhere about how Quinn wasn’t playing fair and how this gave her an unfair advantage… which is insane when you consider the amount of money everyone else is pumping into the system. Sex wasn’t an “unfair advantage”, it was her PR budget.

The second poisoning issue is an over focus on Quinn. Even if you think she’s scum, her being scum has little to do with the industry being corrupt. If a system is going to avoid corruption it has to do it internally. External forces are always going to try and spend money to market to their advantage. Usually we understand this. When a company buys a site takeover, I think most of us groan at the site, not the company because of COURSE the company would want that and it’s the site’s responsibility to say no. Remember, game developers are not in the business of journalism and them not having journalistic integrity doesn’t matter to them. Any real criticism of gaming news should be independent of those offering the money, yet somehow Quinn has garnered more hate than Kotaku for all of this. Kotaku’s integrity matters for the industry. Quinn’s does not.

Then their is the whole “feminists are corrupting game journalism” stuff which is just hilarious nonsense.

I think the sad thing after all this is that there is probably no actual solution to any of this. Movie reviews tend to be more honest because the industry is set up in such a way that… There are tons of reviewers and those reviews appear in papers that people used to buy and if seen on websites now, are with advertising stuff not necessarily related to movies. It’s insular and with other cash sources. I would imagine that it’s getting a lot rougher on movie reviewers now, but the culture of that industry never seemed to be “pay for good reviews” since the returns were so low in trying to do so (instead you’d just block reviews until release if your movie sucked :P). Game reviews get their money now from the industy. From there ads, from their site take overs, for doing in depth previews and even then they don’t make a whole lot of money. We’d have to pay more money to hope to get reviews free of other moneyed interests and with patreon that’s possible, but I feel like in a lot of cases, those journalists will be uncomfortably bound to us. “Hm, I could talk about this important issue that might piss off a lot of people paying for my content or I could just shut my mouth and say this is great”. That’s probably something someone has ALREADY thought about and there is probably someone who lost a whole lot of patrons by opening their mouth.

But hey you can all worry about that, I haven’t read a game review to inform a buying decision in like a decade. That’s what friends are for.

Addendum: So just some more food for thought here.

Quinn slept with five guys. One of them worked for Kotaku. That person wrote one line about depression quest, before they were even dating. Which makes the idea that this is “journalistic corruption” even more laughable and also makes it obvious that she probably just wanted to fuck the guy (because why wouldn’t she maybe want to fuck someone who lived near her and also had an interest in video games?). With the way people talk about it, you’d think she fucked five journalists to get big writeups or something.

(Post has been edited to better reflect this addendum and correct some misinformation. God the internet had me convinced there was more than one journalist but instead nerds are just obsessed with her sexlife)

So I just got a real domain name finally… kayin.moe(yes, really and yes, that kind of moe). So please try and tolerate any weird website wackiness while I try to set up stuff (or beg my sysadmin to do it ps ur da bes colin) and if something seems super wacky just let me know.